94 LONGISLANDPRESS.COM • MARCH 2019
REAR VIEW
FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT
FIGHTING WITH THE WIND
By ANNIE WILKINSON
All through her life, she broke the
rules. Her formal education ended
at age 13. She challenged society’s
notions about womanhood at a time
when few women worked, and set
the gossips’ tongues wagging with
her scandalous two marriages and
two divorces, adultery with a man
10 years her junior, and affairs.
But her force as a writer crushed
the notoriety: She won a legal suit
revolutionizing copyright law
to reimburse writers for profits
from plays based on their works.
A women’s rights advocate, she
signed a writers’ petition on women’s
suffrage before the House of
Representatives in 1910, a year after
building her Plandome estate on the
North Shore.
Frances Hodgson Burnett penned
adult novels, children’s books, and
short stories — 52 novels and 13
plays — and produced works for
the stage. At one point she wrote six
books in 10 years, despite battling
ill health. What drove her?
RICHES TO RAGS
Like her riches-to-rags-to-riches
characters, the author started life
in 1849 in affluent, mid-Victorian
Manchester, England. But their
fortunes collapsed with her father’s
death when she was 4 years
old. Her widowed mother ran their
iron foundry until America’s trade
declines caused it to fail and forced
the family to move to a marginal
area. The behavior of other 10-yearold
street children around Frances
Hodgson fascinated her; observing
their Dickensian existence nurtured
her flair for fiction, writing
on a slate or on old account books.
Still impoverished, her family
moved to America to live with
relatives in a log cabin near Knoxville,
Tennessee. But the Civil
War economy worsened and their
mother’s health failed; only neighborly
generosity kept them alive.
The practical, independent
little girl stepped up, opening a
small school, raising chickens,
and teaching piano.
In 1867, using postage she
paid for by selling grapes, she
submitted a story, for “remuneration,”
as she put it. Godey's
Ladies Book published the
17-year-old’s first two stories,
paying her $35. Her serialized
magazine pieces became popular
and earned enough to
support her family after their
mother died in 1870.
Her first adult novel, That
Lass o’ Lowrie’s, contained
realistic detail about a feisty
woman working in a coal mine. It
was published in 1877, four years
after she married — reluctantly —
Dr. Swan Burnett.
A self-described “story maniac,”
Frances Hodgson Burnett churned
out fluid adult manuscripts needing
little editing. She typified the
''new woman,'' wrote biographer
Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina:
self-supporting, independent,
and a shrewd businesswoman.
The New York Times praised her
“treatment of adultery, spousal
abuse, illegitimacy and female independence.”
Burnett also zeroed
in on unhappy unions, based on her
faltering marriage.
GARDEN THERAPY
In 1886, her Little Lord Fauntleroy,
about a curly-locked boy in velvet
and lace modeled after her son
Vivian, sold half a million copies.
Attributing her dedication to a spiritual
force, she wrote constantly,
her sons at her feet under her writing
desk. She bought extravagantly
— clothes, houses, and
gifts for relatives; more
than 90 gowns; and home
decor for her English estate,
Great Maytham Hall.
And, exhausted and anemic,
she suffered nervous
breakdowns.
She crossed the Atlantic
33 times for business
and pleasure, often with
men, unchaperoned. Her
stressful marriages, bitter
divorces, and the death of
her teenage son Lionel in
1890 brought on depression.
She found comfort
in what Gerzina calls ''a
romantic friendship'' with
Harper’s Bazaar Editor Elizabeth
Garver.
In 1897, her plays earning $1,000 a
week, Burnett settled at Maytham.
There, outside under the trees,
rejuvenated, she wrote A Little
Princess in 1905.
Some say Maytham’s crumbling
garden wall — and its tame robin
— inspired Burnett; others believe
it was her childhood home’s back
garden. The Secret Garden (1910)
was written among hundreds of
rose plantings at Fairseat, her Plandome
estate. It told of an orphaned
girl finding solace in a neglected
garden, who “made herself stronger
by fighting with the wind.”
Like her other children’s classics,
it rose above the era’s florid style
and morality.
She spent her last years at Plandome
among spacious gardens and roses
that sloped down to Long Island
Sound. In 1914, she wrote, “To live
in the best suite of rooms in the best
hotels in any part of Europe is strict
economy in comparison to living at
Plandome Park, Long Island.’'
She died in 1924 and was buried in
the Roslyn cemetery. A fire later
destroyed Fairseat except for its
original stucco carriage house and
garden balustrades.
Dec. 1872 cover of Peterson’s Magazine, engraved portrait of 23-yearold
Burnett based on photograph in Knoxville by T.M. Schleier
/LONGISLANDPRESS.COM
